Open data inventories, ready for human consumption - Sunlight Foundation Blog

"Just in time for Open Data Day, your Uncle Sam — aided and abetted by developers here at Sunlight — is giving you a present. It has taken weeks, but it appears that all Cabinet agencies have released machine-readable lists of their public data holdings, in compliance with President Barack Obama’s open data executive order. Now, with the help of Sunlight's Dan Drinkard and Timothy Ball, you can explore most of these listings in human-readable format. The president's order made thousands of new data sets available for public consumption, allowing citizens to find all sorts of new information in one central repository. But when we checked in on the progress agencies had made in complying with the executive order last month, we wondered aloud how difficult it would be for agencies to list their data holdings in a way that citizens without programming degrees could understand. The president's order resulted in agencies releasing their data listings in JSON format, which fulfills a key component of the executive order, but can prove difficult for non-programmers to manipulate. The executive order also requires agencies to release human-readable versions. Some departments have already complied with this section of the guidance. Others, like Defense, have gone the extra mile to add its complete catalog to the data.gov website, making it easy for users to easily search its full listings. Most agencies, however, have been somewhat slower in this process. In the interest of aiding any academics, activists, journalists or other citizens who would like to easily parse a larger pool of government data, we've made as much of it as we could available in human-readable format. To download an agency-by-agency list of available data sets, in some cases complete with formatting options and key words, you can ..."